A brutal weekend, and a brutal reminder of how broken this moment is. Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman unpack the shocking killing of Rob Reiner and Michelle Reiner, then get into Trump’s grotesque response and what it reveals about the rot at the top. They also hit the GOP cracks in Indiana redistricting, another U.S. campus shooting, and the grim drumbeat of violence and paranoia that never seems to stop.
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Nick, I know we usually do the banter here at the beginning.
Bad weekend.
We're coming off a bad weekend.
One of the worst weekends, as far as I can feel, just, you know, only in the sense that I'm so numb to some of the things that we're going to have to talk about that it doesn't have that same dread that I would have when they've done this in the past.
But when you add it all together, it's like we haven't had a weekend like this in a long time.
And we have a lot of bad weekends now.
I mean, over the course, like, you know, we have like mass shooting weekends, which we're going to talk about that.
We have tragic weekends, fascistic weekends.
I mean, like, it is, we're finishing out 2025 on some bummers.
And I just want to put that out front because what we're dealing with today, the news that we have to unpack, it's tough.
And this is one of the reasons why we do this show.
It's not all shits and giggles.
You know, it is sometimes like unpacking some of the really, really hard things.
So we appreciate you tuning in.
We hope that wherever you are, that you had a better weekend than a lot of people did.
A reminder, head over to patreon.com slash muttrakepodcast, support the show, gain access to the weekender.
Hopefully on Friday, we will have a much lighter episode.
Nick, our lead story today, we will get into the political angle on this secondarily, but we're recording this on Monday, December 15th, last night, Sunday night.
Later in the evening, it came across the wire that director Rob Reiner and his wife, actress Michelle Reiner, producer Michelle Reiner, had been seemingly murdered, possibly by their son in their home.
Again, we'll get into the political aspect of this here in just a second, but I have to assume that you and I similarly respected Reiner, not just as an actor, a comedic talent, but also as an incredible director.
Oh, absolutely.
His career is unparalleled.
I don't think anybody would have would want to wouldn't take his career over anyone else's, certainly.
Just as a pantheon across the wire, the son, Nick Reiner, is arrested for murder.
So I think at this point we could say he had just moved into their house not long ago and had troubles in his life.
So, you know, I just pray for his family and hopefully they can kind of get through this.
But as far as his body of work, I mean, the reason why we're talking about Rob Reiner is because of how great he was as a filmmaker.
But I would be remiss if we didn't make a direct connection to his, where he started as meathead on All in the Family, because that is a show that does have some interesting connection to like where we are now.
No, absolutely.
I mean, Reiner, it's really fascinating, like how much of he was one of those people who had a massive effect on culture in a way that was really kind of like understated.
Everything from, of course, being meathead on All in the Family, but also, I mean, one banger after another of movies that like you kind of forget that this man was behind, you know, everything from Princess Bride, Spinal Tap, Misery, when Harry Met Sally, the list goes on and on and on.
But Nick, the other aspect, before we get into the more present day stuff, this is also a person whose political activism was absolutely central in things like gay marriage being ruled constitutional.
I mean, like, this is this is a guy who has had an imprint on American culture top to bottom for a half century now.
And it's really wild because, again, he was a very sort of quiet person in that regard that you don't really think about like how many things he had actually touched and how many things he had actually influenced.
Oh, well, yeah, absolutely.
And he's a throwback to a time when influencers, quote unquote, like him would actually be politically active and have a voice and lead.
Because most people now are reluctant to do that in that setting because they're afraid of, you know, losing business, right?
Like the bottom line becomes more important.
So he was way out there.
I mean, listen, he just did a JFK podcast that I was certainly, you know, poring over.
And it had a lot of political implications because it did touch upon the CIA's involvement, which we've even found out more about since then.
So yes, there is this whole persona of him that he that he brought into the public, which was awesome.
Now, the funny thing about being meathead in, I thought, in Archie Bunker was that he sort of, that was probably closer to who he really was.
Someone who was very progressive, someone who was out there who actually had a lot of empathy for the public and Archie Bunker, who was a guy, you know, I know Norman Lear wants to do an interview saying Archie Bunker probably wouldn't have liked Trump, but like he kind of personifies that Trump ethos, right?
And so they would battle out every week.
This would be like, you know, it would be the progressive voice against the ultra-conservative people back then.
And it's kind of fascinating now that here we are, and he's now sort of stuck in this other storm of political winds as well around this terrible tragedy.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's bad enough.
I mean, this is one of those human tragedies that you just look at and there's no way whatsoever to feel good about it.
You know, it's really sad all the way around.
There's there's no other way to view this.
But it also makes it worse, Nick, that something like this happens.
And it would be hard enough because you would sort of have to sit with it.
Because if like an artist or a figure or, you know, somebody that meant something to you passed away, you would want a little bit of time to sort of process that, right?
Because that is the thing, these people who like affect our lives like this.
But it's bad enough to have to deal with that.
It's even worse knowing immediately when a tragedy like this strikes that the president of the fucking United States of America is going to obviously do the worst possible thing.
Before we get, we have a clip of him, but this was his original reaction.
This was on Truth Social.
This is from Donald Trump, the president of the United States of America.
A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood.
Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling but once very talented movie director and comedy stars, passed away together with his wife, Michelle, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind-crippling disease known as Trump derangement syndrome, sometimes referred to as TDS.
He was known to have driven people crazy by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness.
And with the golden age of America upon us, perhaps like never before, may Rob and Michelle rest in peace.
Man, fuck that guy.
Here is the president of the United States of America later on in Monday.
You can see it.
Doubling down.
Doubling down.
A number of Republicans have denounced your statement on true social after the murder of Rob Reiner.
Do you stand by that post?
Well, I wasn't a fan of his at all.
He was a deranged person as far as Trump is concerned.
He said he liked, he knew it was false.
In fact, it's the exact opposite that I was a friend of Russia controlled by Russia.
You know, it was the Russia hooks.
He was one of the people behind it.
I think he hurt himself in career-wise.
He became like a deranged person, Trump derangement syndrome.
So I was not a fan of Rob Reiner at all in any way, shape, or form.
I thought he was very bad for our country.
Yeah.
So there it is, Nick.
A pretty beloved figure is murdered along with his wife in a terribly, terribly tragic situation.
And Donald Trump, of course, has to get in there and make it about himself.
Absolutely.
And the projection, you know, once fail, he's calling him a failed filmmaker, you know, whatever.
He's a failed TV star, right?
You know, struggling now with a lot, all sorts of his own issues.
So yeah, it's when you get to this level of, you know, dementia, whatever you want to call it, it kind of makes sense.
It's on brand where he can't see anything outside of the own prism of his own life.
And then projection is all he has left too, because it's seen that way.
So this is someone who, how about this?
Shouldn't Congress censure him for this?
I mean, I mean, that's one thing.
I'm not going to sit here and say that he should be impeached for something like this, but there is certainly the reaction to this has actually been surprising, seeing some Republicans come out and say that this is beyond the pale.
And we'll talk in a second about some other things that have been going on with the Republican Party.
But yes, I mean, like in a country that actually functioned, you would see something, right?
Like this should not be allowed to happen.
And it's not just that it's Rob Reiner.
It's simply like, I want to be clear, like this man's not well.
Like this man is not fit to be the leader of a country.
This man's not fit to be the leader of a company.
He's not fit to be the leader of a restaurant.
He's not fit to be the leader of anything, much less the leader of the free world in the country.
And like this, something like this, it's strange, Nick, because this is a tragedy, an awful, awful tragedy.
But what this reveals about him is something that goes way beyond Rob Reiner.
It goes way beyond him as well.
And so, you know, what I wanted to make an interesting connection to was the Charlie Kirk assassination.
It's coming up a lot in the right-wing circles as well.
Now, if you remember when Kirk was assassinated, there was this push instantly by the right to say that the left was going to say all these horrible things about Charlie Kirk.
600 plus people got lost their jobs.
Yeah.
Now, part of the thing is we're talking about political leaders.
Are they going to do the right thing or not?
And across the board, any Democrat, Democratic political leader, they all had expressed deep sympathy for Charlie Kirk and his family and this terrible thing, right?
That was pretty much unequivocal.
We saw that.
And then it's bubbling up again now because they're using that again to justify what Trump said about Rob Rodner right there and the way he's shitting on this guy in death after being murdered brutally in his own home.
So and trying to assign this ridiculous reason for it.
So I think we need to find a way to make it acceptable to be nice to each other again.
And if you're wondering like how much influence a president has across the country in a meaningful amount of time, like depending on how long they've been president, it could affect the country for decades.
This is what we're now seeing.
The right is now up in arms and they're justifying what he's saying about Reiner.
A, because it's Trump and they can't go against the leader, but it's weakness if you want to express sympathy.
It's weakness to be kind to other people.
And that's what he's done.
He's turned that thing around.
And now people are loath to be helpful.
And it's really, really just an ugly place that could continue to be that way for a long, long time.
Yeah.
And there's a cleaving that's taking place.
It's something that you and I have talked about and touched on here and there because, again, MAGA is not a big homogenized movement.
It's brought together by a bunch of different interests, a bunch of different worldviews.
And in the middle of this, there are people who are like, yeah, absolutely.
I love this shit.
I love that the president of the United States of America is just absolutely a degenerate asshole.
Some people do.
Meanwhile, there are other Republicans who are saying, hey, this is gross.
There are other Republicans who are saying, hey, where are the Epstein files?
Which, by the way, we didn't even talk about like, God knows how many pictures got released, you know, just recently of that.
Other people are saying, hey, no new wars, you name it.
Then we have other instances.
This is one of the lone bright spots of this entire episode and what's happened over the past few days.
Last Thursday in Indiana, my home state, the members of the Republican statehouse crossed the aisle to vote with the Democratic Party to turn down the pushed redistricting Trump plan to basically hand over two more House seats to the Republican Party.
This happened, Nick, after weeks and a month or so of pressure from Trump on the Republicans in the state to the point where multiple members of the Republican Party in the state were not only spotlit by Donald Trump and focused on by him, but they were actually swatted.
They received death threats.
They received stalking threats, you name it.
And the fact that these Republicans came out and said, you know what, this is unacceptable that the president of the United States of America is trying to do this to members of his own party and to affect the system.
Lone bright spot.
And I hardly ever do this, Nick.
This is not usually my little place on the block.
Hats off to them.
They did the right thing and they did a courageous thing.
Good for them.
But I do think in that cleaving that we're talking about right now, that this is another one of those moments that we can look at and say, there are things happening within the Republican Party right now that will affect the future.
For sure.
You know, we poor one out or not, poor one out, you know, raise a glass to somebody like Rusty Bowers.
If you remember him back in Arizona, who stood up to Trump during the 2020 election, to have these are the people that are, you know, blazing a path, which is horribly ridiculous to say, right?
But we need people in the Republican Party to finally do this and stand up and say, this is not right.
And even in the face of, yes, a great personal risk of their safety, because we know that all it takes is one post from this guy from Trump that will cause people to be under intense harm and be threatened.
So, you know, we have to try and figure out what this means because I said this before, the fact that they were trying to get redistricting done to increase the number of seats sort of is a positive in the sense that they're still pretending that we're going to have a free and fair election when it actually happens.
They're trying to make it all happen before the election, right?
To get all or whatever, but at least this seems to indicate that they're going to, you know, let the election go through if they can wrench it up before the actual vote.
Yeah, there's a lot to unpack here.
First things first, Trump's comments about Reiner and the way that he has turned the spotlight on these Republicans in Indiana.
You know what it makes me think of, Nick, is it makes me think of January 6th, in which he more or less told his supporters to kill Mike Trump or Mike Pence, right?
Like go in, like Mike Pence is a coward.
He didn't do what he was supposed to do.
Here are the leaders who have like tried to steal this election.
And he's able to do the stochastic terrorism of not saying, you know, these people should die, but saying enough around it to let people know that he's okay with it.
In this case, Nick, I mean, like the post that he had on True Social, you read through it linguistically, and basically it's saying Rob Reiner had it coming because he wouldn't stop criticizing me and he wouldn't stop talking about this stuff.
Therefore, he deserved to die.
When it comes to the Republican legislators, in this case, they got swatted, they got harassed, they got death threats.
Well, they stepped outside of the line, which tells us one direction the Republican Party can go, which is a more anti-democratic, more fascistic direction, which is where it is likely to go unless something changes.
But we are seeing some fissures here.
We're starting to see some members of the party who are like, I'm tired of this.
I don't want to live within this.
And a lot of it has to do with the fact that he is essentially a lame duck until he tries to run again if he survives to 2028.
That fact is there.
And also it goes back to the divisions we're talking about.
Everything from the Epstein stuff to the America First stuff, the affordability problems.
There are people who are starting to look for a lane outside of Trump.
And we're definitely starting to see those fissures start to grow and grow and grow.
Yeah.
And would it be interesting to hear Trump's reaction when they asked him about Indiana and how it fell apart for him?
I can't wait.
All right, here we go.
A number of Republicans voted against that redistricting effort.
You have spent a lot of time talking about this.
The vice president traveled to Indiana.
What's your reaction?
Well, we won every other state.
That's the only state is funny because I won Indiana all three times by a landslide and I wasn't working on it very hard.
You know, this is a derangement syndrome, isn't it?
It's a derangement.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He was working on it very hard.
Yeah.
I mean, Vance went to Indiana to deal with this.
Yeah.
And Trump was raging against these people constantly.
It's literally, you know, sour grapes.
Well, I didn't want it anyway.
I didn't really care all that much anyway.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But it is a pretty big loss.
It is from a political standpoint.
It's positive if you are against the Trump and the Republicans.
This is indicating something, right?
This is something we wouldn't have had during even, you know, the second half of his first administration, right?
As he solidified that control, no one would really dare.
Not only did he solidify control over the GOP, he got mansion in the cinema, right, to basically flip and then quit.
So that's a lot of power.
That's a lot of influence they ended up having, which I think this is the beginning or the whatever this is of some indication that people are going to finally stand up to a little bit of this and realize it's losing.
And I want to make it clear because this is, again, this is actually my corner.
That doesn't mean that this is going to shake out for the best.
This doesn't mean that the anti-Trump Republicans are somehow or another going to take over the party.
We wouldn't be talking about this if this was the norm, right?
This is way outside of the norm.
What I'm pointing out is more how this is going to start to look over the next few months and years, which is that there is going to be an intra-party sort of fraucus in this regard.
And what you just brought up, Nick, and you're exactly right.
I want to remind people of what it was like back during the first Trump term, which Jeff Sessions, Trump basically rode Jeff Sessions around like he was a horse and just sessions was like, you're right, sir.
I'm a rhino.
Thank you so much for spotlighting me constantly.
I really appreciate it.
That's what it was for a very long time.
Now there is room for people and for the record.
Somebody like a Marjorie Taylor Greene, although she's doing all this for profit and she's doing this for her own political future, the fact that she is, it's like in one of those movies, and I'm sure you've seen it, Nick, where all of a sudden the rats they look around, they're like, oh, we got to get out of this room, right?
And you're like, wait, where are the rats going?
And it's like, all of a sudden, the wall of flame comes through.
That's what's happening right now is there is room and it's being symbolized by the people who are starting to push back against this shit.
And as usual, the precursor to the wall of flame is the awful smell.
That's that's true.
You know, so which is appropriate in this instance as well.
So yeah, it's slightly encouraging.
Although, you know, having gone through this weekend, it's not easy to find much encouragement in life in general with what we have to deal with.
But we have to hope that, again, these elections will be fair.
It will be open.
You have to listen, you got to hope for it and prepare for them not to be.
That's the way to do this thing.
Speaking of tough things from the weekend in Sydney, Australia in Bondi Beach, a father and son allegedly killed 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration.
Nick, this is one of those, I think you were alluding to it earlier where you feel sort of desensitized to it, but this is still one of those moments that like you see it and the mortal soul recoils from it.
This is so common now and just such a disastrous tragedy.
And as we move forward in time, you know, more and more people have phones.
And so no longer is this a thing like that happened in Calibine where we have, you know, this terrible imagery.
Sorry, this like low quality, you can barely see anything, whatever.
Now we're going to get perfect HD footage.
The person, there's an 11-minute video of the entire thing, practically.
Person's not even 100 feet away, maybe.
And they're like, I imagine they're hiding behind something, but they're just filming the whole thing.
And it is numbing.
We continually see these awful, awful images.
And I am worried because I don't even have that same feeling in the pit of my stomach and that recoil that I would normally have instantly from all this stuff happening.
And it's violent.
It's graphic, what you see.
And it's almost like, you know, what are we supposed to do at this point?
To have it happen in a country like Australia, which hadn't had a mass shooting for 30 years and for the exact reason that they were able to limit gun ownership by the masses and, you know, there for all these years is even more concerning.
And you know what?
Kudos to them for figuring out how to make even more stringent gun laws now out of all of this.
But I suppose the elephant in the room we have to talk about is the motivation for why this has all happened.
Yeah.
And I mean, it is just, it's one thing after another.
Of course, this is an anti-Semitic targeted attack.
And one of the things, and I hate that this is one of my research focuses on this type of extremism.
This is being celebrated by the same people who celebrated the Christchurch shooting, who celebrated the Norway shootings, who look at any sort of violence, whether it's against Jews or minorities or immigrants or Muslims or whatever it is.
It's a group of fascist and neo-Nazis who look at this and they, whether they're cheering for it or aspiring to it, it is simply becoming a more and more common thing because of groups of extremists and racist, and you name it, have just like the hatred has grown and grown and grown.
And yes, it's the guns.
It's also the hatred.
It's also the internet.
You name it.
It's also mental health.
It's all of it wrapped up into one.
And what you just said about, you know, becoming desensitized to this or just sort of seeing it and being like, yeah, I guess that's that's the way that it is.
I mean, I think is such a marker of how hard these times are.
And I just want to say, like, we should not be desensitized to this in any way, shape, or form.
It's, it's a wretched state of things.
I think what makes this interestingly unique is that it's a father and son who carried this thing out.
And the part of the reporting was that the son had been investigated for ISIS connections in Australia.
And my first impression when I heard that, and I was putting this together in terms of father and son, which as far as I can tell, has never happened before.
We've never had a father and son do this kind of thing.
I'd done, you know, I'd spent some time trying to find out.
We got the DC sniper.
Was there a son involved in that?
Yeah, it was a son figure, wasn't it?
But like not a pairing of both of them at the same time firing and trying to kill everybody.
Oh, yeah, it was.
The sniper was one person.
Yeah, but they helped each other like they were doing it in tandem.
Oh, I don't remember that.
There's no whole pod about that.
Okay, it wasn't a son, but it was a father.
I couldn't remember, but it was like a father figure towards me.
Interesting.
All right.
I can't remember that.
But okay, so it's twice.
But I think what my point was then I was looking at this thinking, you know, if this has a connection to like, is there a connection to ISIS or to Hezbollah or something like that where they're because, you know, to get a gun, in theory, you need some sort of outside help to be able to get guns to somebody.
Now, that said, I think the other reporting was, is that he was part of a gun club.
And there are these carve outs where you can get a gun if you were in certain things and this and that, whatever.
So it's might in over a number of years, he was able to amass, you know, these the guns that he had.
But part of me felt like, well, if this was connected at all to some sort of an ISIS thing or, you know, a terrorism, it's possible that the father doesn't even look at his son as a son.
They're just soldiers, you know, in this, in this war that they're trying to fight, I guess.
And that's what was going on here.
I suppose we'll get more information about motivation and how this was all carried out.
But, you know, the concern, I think, because it was a targeted thing for Jewish people celebrating Hanukkah, is that, you know, this is what's going on out of what's happening with Israel and Gaza, right?
And how that will foment across the world, the hatred that we're seeing, which, you know, lies, you know, I know that Netanyahu had words, strong words against the prime minister of Australia, but it's really like Netanyahu himself is the guy who you have to point a finger towards if you're looking for actions that would incite this kind of violence.
Yeah, it's such an awful and complicated thing.
I hate this and my heart breaks for it.
Like it's, you know, you look at it and like what you were pointing out with the father and the son, like that's, that's just so twisted.
Going out and killing people during a celebration like this, like it's so, it's so fucked.
But let me put one more pin on that one because it, you know, a lot of times you'll see the actions of somebody who is mentally imbalanced, right?
And has deep mental issues.
When you have more than one person, that becomes less of the issue here.
That's the sort of, I think my point was, this isn't necessarily someone who lost their minds and decided to shoot, you know, like we've seen in the past.
And those are the people they catch easily, whatever.
This is, you know, my worry now is when you have two people in the same family, this becomes something much more coordinated, which could be much more dangerous.
I mean, sometimes there are tandems of criminals that work together.
The parental element of it is very, very strange.
I mean, all of it is very strange, very disturbing.
Speaking of disturbing, we had our own mass shooting here in the United States of America.
We're not going to be outdone when it comes to that bullshit.
At Brown University in Rhode Island, two people were killed.
Nine were injured.
The FBI briefly detained a suspect and then released them.
There's a lot to look at here.
In a way, you have to say, oh, a mass shooting in America.
What is there even left to say about it?
Right.
Like, what?
And I want to be clear about that.
Like, we don't cover every mass shooting in this country.
Like, we wouldn't get anything else done.
Right.
I mean, there would be literally nothing else to talk about.
But in this case, we have the FBI like totally botching this thing.
We don't even know if we're going to catch the person who did this.
It's just a more troubling aspect.
And, you know, I know people who are at Brown.
It sounded like an absolutely horrific and nightmarish situation.
I hate that people have to wonder if their kids are going to be safe as they're going to school.
What a disgusting situation.
And then on top of it, you have an incompetent FBI that you can't even trust to take care of these things.
Yeah.
And it had Trump himself announcing that they got somebody and then they had to walk back.
And he pretended like it was reported by the police who had never reported any of that to begin with.
And here's the thing.
You're using the past tense in terms of that the danger is over.
They have not caught this person.
And I got to tell you, if my kid was going to Brown, I would have been on a plane the minute I heard about this and gotten them.
I went there, dragged them out of there, and we under, you know, undercover of whatever to make sure no one else got shot on the way out.
This could still happen, right?
Now, this one sounds like it could be somebody who is completely lost their minds and is insane.
And again, you know, who knows what they're going to do next, you know, in terms of that.
Nobody, I don't think anyone is safe right now near that area until they catch the guy.
So that's what's so frightening about it.
They literally release this camera footage of him going around a corner from behind.
You can't tell me they didn't have any other footage from inside any of these buildings.
There's no way that doesn't exist.
They couldn't release anything else to show a little bit more who this is.
They're going door to door.
I suppose I appreciate the old school version of trying to find somebody and put in the ground.
But this is extremely concerning that they haven't been able to figure out who this is and have any, basically any other leads now in terms of keeping people safe in that area.
It's one of those things where it's just like, how in the hell does this happen?
And then you remember, we were talking about Charlie Kirk a couple of minutes ago.
Remember how they mishandled that shit?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, the guy, the guy was getting away.
He like, I mean, he got turned in by his dad.
It wasn't the FBI like doing field work, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's just not, it's not working.
Well, the other thing is, and you would probably respond to this as well, is terms of the, you know, schools are the softest targets.
Schools.
And so I'm trying to sort of extrapolate what that would mean if like, if the Trump doctrine continued past this for the next 10 years or 12, 15 years, what schools would end up looking like?
Yeah.
They certainly wouldn't do anything to try and get guns out of society.
No.
They're going to, yeah, they're going to end up making, you know, and that would be the only solution at that point.
If you're not going to get rid of guns, which we've seen gets rid of or lowers or gets rid of mass shootings, then the only solution, yes, is to harden every school at every age.
And they're all, I mean, listen, imagine having to go to school now.
You're already doing, what do they call it?
Like lockdown drills?
No, you're not just doing lockdown drills.
You're doing like targeted practice in terms of like how you barricade yourself in a room and how you like get the gun or fight back or, you know, you're being sold like tactical backpacks and tactical clothes.
Like that's, that's the reality for a lot of kids now.
You want to wrap your head around some more reality, Jared?
Think about this.
Every day now we have a mass shooting.
The likelihood that someone in that mass shooting had survived another mass shooting is extremely high.
And we'll continue.
No, we've had people who have died in a mass shooting who had survived already a mass shooting.
Yeah, that will simply continue to go up.
And what you just said is exactly, it's not just in schools.
Schools underneath a regime like this and the regimes that will come after it if we don't change things are going to become more and more like prisons.
They already are.
The presence of officers, metal detectors, all of this shit, like that is that they're not going to deal with the guns.
It simply is not going to be dealt with.
They're not going to deal with any of the other components of any of this.
They're simply going to basically, you know, make everything a carceral center.
And that's not just going to be schools.
That's going to be public areas.
That's going to be stores.
And we're already seeing that.
We're already seeing that in stores.
You go into a store now, like chances are you're going to see a security guard there with a gun at the door.
They're not going to take care of the root causes.
They're not going to take care of the consequences.
And we'll get to this more in a second.
It's not like the FBI or law enforcement.
We had this conversation.
I think it was at the weekend or last week.
We were talking about how law enforcement is, you know, has all of the like desire to do anything as like, you know, people playing cops in a movie.
Like there's no actual sort of action here.
And so you look at this and they're just, there's money to be made by turning schools and public areas into prison-like places, which is the entire reason we are on the trajectory we are.
It pays more to capitalize on the problem than it does to actually solve the problem.
And this concept might sound very familiar, but basically they'll pat themselves on the back for hardening all the schools and then saying, haven't had a school shooting for, you know, this whole time.
They'll pat themselves on the back for not having immigration problems across the border because they've made life so awful for people in normal society that no one will want to even come here anyway, much less risk getting across the border now.
That is their end game, right?
It's like they would, and as a result, the result of that would be not an open society.
Yes.
But they can still say, well, look, it's not open.
We don't care about that.
We just care about, oh, these people aren't being shot anymore.
Like that's really a justification.
You know, the same thing that's going to happen in Gaza.
When they make that into a resort town and then 30 years later, everyone's like, oh, isn't this nice?
And we get so peaceful and quiet and beautiful on the Mediterranean.
But like that's the justification.
9-11, same idea.
What they did to people to Muslims in this country and how they hardened things and turned the whole country against people of color, their justification will be like, we haven't had another 9-11.
That's the only, that's all it is.
And that's where we're at.
That's the mindset.
Well, but the school shootings will happen because the officers or the teachers who are carrying the weapons will then shoot the students.
Where'd you just go?
That's what replaces the mass shootings at that point.
And if you think they're going to stop mass shootings in general, they're not.
Like they're still going to continue.
It's still going to happen, particularly as material conditions deteriorate.
Like as like, that's the whole point.
The whole nut here, it's not just the guns.
It's also the conditions that are making people act worse, feel worse and behave worse.
Those things all put together, like as long, if society gets worse and worse, you're still going to see murder.
You're still going to see mass shootings.
You're going to see all of this.
It's just going to take on new sort of notations.
It's what I keep talking about with neoliberalism, Nick, which is you're going to have one society, one part of society, the haves, much like, you know, they get the premium seats in the airplane.
They get treated like normal human beings.
They get a little bit of space in order to like spread their legs a little bit.
And then the rest of us are treated like cattle.
And the rest of us are going to live in a society that is more and more prison-like and more and more violent.
And also, we live a shorter life.
And that is what's going to pay for the other people to be up in the premium area with the leg space, with their own private guards, with their own private police.
Their kids are not going to go to schools where there are mass shootings.
They're not going to go to schools where there are metal detectors.
And the guards are not going to be standing there holding their guns and waving them in children's faces.
And so the whole point is it's making it so that they can continue to accrue resources and wealth.
And the rest of us will have to bear the brunt of the burden.
I can't answer that at all.
And by the way, speaking of the FBI and the bang up job that they are absolutely doing, they have Nick.
I want to read this, but I want to make sure for the people who listen to the podcast that the appropriate verbal note is there.
Nick, they have disrupted a plot.
And that plot is from an extremist group outside of Los Angeles.
Thank God, by the way, I'd be worried something would happen to you.
A group called the Turtle Islands something.
They're environmentalists.
They're far-left radicals.
They're pro-Palestinian.
They were going to plant so many bombs on New Year's Eve, Nick.
Like they were going to take down America, more or less.
Thank God the FBI took them down.
Thank God.
Well, remember what I was asking about when we did the pod about what's the PTA?
One battle after another.
Yeah.
And I'm like, do we really even have the weathermen anymore or anything like that?
And, you know, it's like, well, this is now the example.
They're still around and they are still plotting.
I mean, if you want to believe what the FBI is saying, but at this point, you know, it's all so much obfuscation that you don't know.
And it's so bumbling as it is when they're doing all this stuff that you just don't know whether or not to trust this or not.
I mean, it certainly sounds really convenient that all of a sudden they can announce this in the middle of everything that's going on.
Do you think about this all the time?
It's one of the most fascinating stories.
You remember we talked about it that place outside of New York where they found all of like the routers and all of the phones.
And they were like, oh, they're going to take down the cell service.
Yeah.
This was a, this was an international terrorist plot to take down all of the cell service.
And nobody ever said anything else about it.
Like nothing ever, nothing ever got brought up in any way, shape, or form.
They are knocking, Nick, they are knocking down one plot after another, aren't they?
Like, it's incredible how many plots they're taking down.
In this case, like, I couldn't even hazard a guess what it was they actually found.
Like, they probably like found some chats or Discord or something with these people who are like, oh, man, I would love to like do this or whatever.
And they're like, oh, caught him.
Done.
Lock them up.
And what are they going to do?
We now have a regime that we cannot trust a single word that they say.
We don't know what diseases are happening.
We don't know what weather is coming.
We don't know what statistics say.
We don't know what the reports say.
We don't know if the FBI is actually disrupting plots or not.
We have no clue at any given moment exactly what's happening.
We are living in one of the most mystified modern eras that you could ever imagine being in.
Well, you know, the irony, I'm not sure irony is the right word, but like we're in a situation now where like we don't really trust the FBI, Castro Tel, you know, and there's, you know, you shouldn't have trusted him in the first place, but yes, we really don't you might remember it was a long time ago, but the FBI era Mar-a-Lago and that became a touchstone for the right to say the FBI, right, is this horrible place that they'll that feels like two lifetimes ago, by the way.
Yeah, right now, so so suddenly like the FBI becomes this bastion of like liberalism or whatever, you know, against the, you know, against Trump, which is also makes you laugh.
But even go back to the guns.
It's like, why do people want the guns?
A lot of times, you know, it's not the hunting thing, right?
They want to be able to stand up to a tyrannical government.
So the big irony now is that everybody on the left, it's almost like, well, yeah, we're going to need the guns.
We're the ones who want who want them because we're going to have to stand up to something here that's going on that's against the fabric of democracy, you know, but then they're like, no, we still need to have them.
So it's like, I don't know what to make of any of this.
This is like upside down and then right back side up again.
And then before we know it, it's over.
It's like it's a whirlwind twister that I can't wrap my head around.
It's so absolutely even looking at this thing.
Okay, so they are tied to what officials described as a radical faction of the Turtle Island Liberation Front called Order of the Black Lotus.
I mean, that's all I needed to hear.
Wait, wait.
So it's a faction inside the faction?
I didn't realize.
It's a faction within a faction.
Or a faction within a movement.
It's a faction within a movement.
I mean, like, my guess, if I had my expertise, I'm going out on the wire.
I have to assume it's part of Antifa.
I have to imagine that they're having parties like where they are.
I mean, the things these people are up to.
And like, we're just not going to know.
We're just literally not going to know.
If only we could figure out, by the way, where Antifa actually is, if we could get to the bottom of that.
Is there anybody working on that, Nick?
We actually had the FBI appear in front of Congress.
And God bless Benny Thompson had some interesting questions about Antifa because, again, this really fits into what we're dealing with in terms of the head of the FBI or the leadership of the FBI.
Any domestic terrorist organization that poses a threat to the homeland as we speak.
I'd say the first one, you know, President Trump had just announced executive board of domestic terrorist organization Antifa.
That's our primary concern right now.
All right, that's what President Trump did.
What did the FBI say?
We share the same view.
When you look at the data right now, you look at the domestic terrorist threat that we're facing.
Right now, what I see from my position is that's the most immediate violent threat that we're facing on the domestic side.
So where is Antifa headquartered?
What we're doing right now with the organization.
Where in the United States does Antifa exist if it's a terrorist organization and you've identified it as number one?
We are building out the infrastructure right now.
So what does that mean?
I'm just, we're trying to get the information.
You say Antifa is a terrorist organization.
Tell us as a committee, how did you come to that?
Where do they exist?
How many members do they have in the United States as of right now?
Well, that's very fluid.
It's ongoing for us to understand that.
The same, no different than Al-Qaeda and ISIS.
No, no.
Okay.
It's very fluid, Nick.
I thought it was in an episode of The Office, to be honest with you.
It's incredible.
It's incredible.
And by the way, I'm glad that he brought up Al-Qaeda because that was completely blown up too.
Like Al-Qaeda was treated as if it was Cobra from G.I. Joe.
They had secret mountain bases, you know, where they were plotting their nefarious plots.
And it was really just like a small group that got, yeah, and actually turned into a larger group because the United States needed this arch enemy.
And so now, like, it, the fact that they're going out and doing this with Antifa and the Black Lotus, I guess, that it just shows that these are not serious people.
They have serious power and they have serious ambitions, but they are not serious people.
Right.
They're just desperate to remain in the spotlight.
They're desperate to distract from their own foibles and their own issues.
They're not doing well with the government.
You know, that doesn't work for that long, generally, right?
Even if it's a small change in public opinion polls and those kind of things, there is an indication that, yes, things are going really poorly.
I mean, the interesting thing about some of the polls I saw recently were that the Hispanic vote has completely flipped back against Trump, as it, you know, even though it had gone for him in 2024, which is also a very strange concept going into 2024.
It was never really clear why that was happening in such it was verifiable, big numbers.
So we're seeing, you know, whole communities, you know, particularly Hispanic people, you know, going against making sense of what's going on with ICE.
And so, you know, we can't help but point to anything other than the fact that this is going to hurt them politically.
Well, it's not going to be good.
And I, one quick bright spot in the middle of this for people who didn't pay as close attention, or maybe they don't remember, Nick, after 2001, after September 11th, the government created so many fake plots, so many terrorist rings that were almost all of them groomed by the FBI, right?
That they basically were like, hey, you're a Muslim immigrant in the United States of America.
Don't you want to destroy America?
And they're like, no, man, I'm just doing some stuff.
And they're like, don't you want to destroy it?
And they just would not stop until they were able to arrest them and be like, hey, we made a giant arrest.
Al-Qaeda was basically going to destroy the country.
We had the terror, the terror warning alert system with all the colors, right?
And they, Nick, that was after one of the most consequential terrorist attacks of all time.
People got tired of that shit.
They got real, I mean, bad things happened.
And, you know, anti-Islamophobic shit happened and civil rights were taken away.
And the modern era was created by that.
But what they're doing is trying to create an aura of fear.
And that does work to a certain extent, but people get tired of it.
And they also see through it.
They understand at some point so many ham-fisted sort of attempts.
And I think this is one of those.
I agree.
I agree.
And wait till you find out about how they collected the evidence in like Luigi Mangion case and all the some other cases, right?
You're going to find out.
Now, listen, part of that is the local police department as well.
But just a little tip: don't be surprised if Mangioni gets off because of the tainted way they handled all the evidence and the actual investigation itself.
We're having an ineptitude across all the law enforcement stuff that's insane.
And the only thing that they're going to probably hope to be able to still make it stick is if somehow the judges can get completely taken over by these right-wing zealots who don't seem to care about the law.
That's another word we need to have at some point.
All right, everybody.
That's going to do it for this episode of the Mutrade Podcast.
We'll be back with the weekender on Friday.
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